When I was nine my parents sent me off to be a chorister at St Michael’s College, Tenbury, in the heart of the Worcestershire countryside. […]  Alone in the beautiful library I spent hours taking off the shelves the various tomes of sweet-smelling old music and trying to play it on the piano, absconding from walks and more healthy-minded school activities for as long as I was undiscovered.  The magic of those hours―seeing everything for the first time―was intense.

But sweetest of all were the hours spent singing Matins and Evensong every day in the colourful Victorian chapel.  Scarcely anyone was there but us.  Our solitary reverence was not unrelieved, however.  I can remember the obsessive games of Bible cricket played with my neighbors in the heavy choir stalls during the reading of the lessons.  […]

Nevertheless, the glory of singing to nobody but God, the sunlight streaming through the stained glass, was part of the same world of childish excitement.  At times we would attain an epiphanic splendor―in a Lassus motet, in a recent canticle, using the full power of the large Father Willis organ.  I would get the key and enter the church, often after dark, to play strange improvisations on this organ.  The silence of the building was haunting, very frightening―yet I was fascinated.  Why?  I don’t know.  Music came out of it, dissolved back into it.  There were ghosts.